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Four members of the Organising Committee (OC) will complete their 3 year term this summer, and will therefore be standing down at the Annual General Meeting at Colet House on Sunday June 5th 2016.

The posts they hold are Finance Officer (Ruth Nightingale), Publicity (James Bailey) and two Training Engagement representatives (Dawn Gwilt and Helen Thomas). All four posts are therefore open to the membership to stand for election, and at the same time James, Ruth and Helen will be standing for re-election. Ruth is looking to stay for up to 1 more year, and encourages anyone interested in the post of Finance Officer to stand too in order to have a hand-over period.

Membership of the OC offers engagement with a supportive, creative and dynamic group of gestalt practitioners who are committed to supporting and developing the interests of the gestalt community in the UK and further afield.

We meet three to four times each calendar year, usually on a Saturday, sharing lunch and fun as well as having rich discussions, making decisions and putting into action the day-to-day management of the Association. Please see the UKAGP Constitution for a detailed description of the role of the Committee.

This is your opportunity to join the team! We would love to talk with you if you have an interest. Please contact us at the email addresses that follow the brief role descriptions below for more information:

Finance Officer:

You will be responsible for the co-ordination and monitoring UKAGP finances; work in close collaboration with the Organising Committee. The role requires precise and accurate working; good communication skills; numerical and analytical insight; capacity to act on your own initiative; and negotiating skills.

Please contact Ruth Nightingale on Finances@ukagp.org.uk for more information.

Publicity Officer

You will be responsible for the co-ordination of UKAGP publicity; content management for newsletters and website information; publicity strategy working in close collaboration with the Organising Committee and administrator. Ideally, we are looking for someone with previous marketing and publicity experience and some experience of social networking skills may add value to our work together

Please contact James Bailey on Publicity@ukagp.org.uk for more information.

Training Engagement Representative:

You are ideally a current trainee, or pre-accreditation therapist. You will be motivated to facilitate a working group made up of trainee representatives from all the Gestalt Training Institutes in the UK, in order to support inter-institute dialogue and allow the trainee voice to be well represented on the OC.

Please contact Dawn Gwilt and Helen Thomas on Training@ukagp.org.uk for more information.

Honorary Treasurer

This post sits outside of the committee, and is open to current or retired finance professionals, or people with sound financial experience, looking for an opportunity to do some voluntary work. The main role would be to have a consistent person who stays as committee members come and go, and to offer support as needed to the finance officer. There is no requirement to attend committee meetings.

Please contact Ruth Nightingale on Finances@ukagp.org.uk for more information.

‘Developing Embodied interventions and experiments within the co-created embodied field’

Julianne Appel-Opper will offer the next series of 3 English speaking weekend workshops in Berlin on 21-23 Oct 2016; 20-22 Jan 2017; 21-23 April 2017 – for a detailed flier and to apply, please email: Julianne.ao@web.de. Thank you!

Rooted in Dialogical Gestalt Psychotherapy, the workshops will focus on bodily gestalten as tiny movements, rhythms and melodies of two bodies relating, regulating and communicating with each other. In an embodied field, therapist and client move each other and are moved by the other. The workshops will give the opportunity to discover and explore ways of how the therapist can work with ‘body-to-body-communication’. The therapist’s own bodily attunement to the relational language of the client’s body, alongside an awareness of one’s personal physical resonances, allows the possibility for explicit interaction within this mode of body-to-body-communication (not touching). Julianne offers a safe and respectful space for exercises, experiential process, live supervision and demonstration, theory input and small group work. The participants will receive a 30-page-handout with the relevant theoretical concepts.

Julianne is a UKCP reg. Integrative and Gestalt Psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer. For more information, for example to download publications or to read what others said about the workshops, please visit her website at: www.thelivingbody.de

Reflections on the long and winding road to accreditation…

By Dawn Gwilt

I’ve been asked to write something for the UKAGP newsletter about my recent experience of becoming a qualified Gestalt practitioner.

It is now six months since I submitted my final assignments (in July 2015) for my Advanced Diploma and UKCP registration, and I found out that I passed in November and became registered in December. As I look back, my process divides into two very contrasting experiences of before and after submitting my work, and I’d like to write something about this contrast.

The ‘before’ period was the two years after I completed my training and before I submitted my final assignments. During this time I prioritised working on my case study and tape transcript, putting much of my life on hold in order to devote time and energy to writing.

What stands out from this stage of the process is the feeling of having to jump through so many hoops, and only gradually coming to understand what those hoops were. I often felt I was squeezing myself in order to fit, and with that memory I instinctively squeeze my arms to my sides and lower my head, making myself smaller. Initially the criticism of my case study seemed harsh and at times I felt crushed and over-exposed. A growing edge for me was to trust that I wouldn’t lose myself through working relationally rather than independently. An experiential shift came as my tutor and I stayed with and worked through the co-transference around criticism. Gradually, what had seemed harsh developed into supportive dialogue, enabling me to grow into my own authority.

Perhaps this was a necessary process leading to the ‘after’ period, which has been a complete contrast. For the first time since I started my training, I am reconfiguring my support system purely for myself, finding and creating tailor-made supports without the added pressure of having to complete assignments for others to assess. This is a delightful process! I have formed a peer supervision group with two of my fellow-trainees who qualified around the same time as me, as well as making other shifts in my supervision.

I have also started a self-questioning process about my work as a therapist – What do I like? What am I good at? When do I feel most effective, or least effective? As I move forward with these questions, I feel myself expanding, growing, taking up my full size and space. An image comes to me of a cartoon character who has been flattened by a heavy weight, and now with the weight removed, is gradually springing back into shape.

I know I am not alone in finding this process extremely challenging. My understanding of the process of becoming qualified is to prove beyond doubt that I am a competent, safe, reliable and ethical practitioner, and I fully agree with the necessity of this. Some questions remain for me: Is it possible to
make this assessment in a more supportive way? Is the process overly demanding? Or is it necessary to go through this process in order to arrive at this place of looking outward, fully engaged with my excitement and emerging sense of direction?

Dawn Gwilt is a UKCP registered Gestalt Psychotherapist with over seven years clinical experience. She trained at Welsh Psychotherapy Partnership, and presently works in private practice at Birmingham Counselling and Psychotherapy Centre and Worcester Therapy Group. She worked previously with Cruse Bereavement Care, Primrose Hospice, and Birmingham Women’s Aid. Prior to becoming a psychotherapist she trained as a classical cellist and worked both as a teacher and a performer. Visit Dawn’s website @ www.birminghamtherapy.com

An Overview of the meeting on Friday 8th January 2016, at the Gestalt Centre, London

Beginning

After the first short meeting to form the CG at the UKAGP conference in July 2015, where representatives from various organisations came together in support of creating this group, and positive feedback from all the organisations contacted, we finally found a date that most people could make to meet.

However, circumstances interrupted that, and in the end we received apologies from 8 delegates out of the 20 people, (18 delegates and reserve delegates from 14 organisations) who were invited, and in the event 9 delegates from 6 organisations were able to attend, along with two UKAGP members as facilitator and note taker. Although we had 3 hours allocated, people arrived in stages, and there was just over an hour whereeveryone was present at the same time.

This felt like a huge achievement, and I experienced excitement and energy as the group grew, and we continued to reintroduce ourselves, each iteration clarifying our sense of purpose as we began the process of finding out who we were and what we were doing there.

There was a sense of occasion, and it was recognised that there had been many previous attempts over the years to bring Gestalt institutes together, and that something about this felt different and with potential for a meeting of the wider community.

I explained the two main strands that had led me to initiate the Consultative Group (CG) in the first place: UKAGP, as the umbrella association or National Organisation of Gestalt Therapy (NOGT) is authorised to represent Gestalt Therapy at the European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT).

Each European country that has a NOGT sends a representative to sit on EAGT’s General Board (GB) which meets twice a year.

When I took this role on as Chair of UKAGP, I began to reflect on how I could do this with more democracy and legitimacy, when there seemed to be a missing piece in the communication. I wanted to create a structure whereby representatives from the various institutes and organisations in the country could meet and share information and knowledge, and from there I (or whoever else was in my position) would have a better idea of the current situation. This would also be a space in which to share what conversations and activities which were being reported in the General Board, which in turn could then be disseminated back to the various organisations.

The second strand, was a wish to enable UKAGP to really put into practice its aims and objectives in its position as an umbrella association. I believe that key members/directors/leaders of the various Gestalt institutes and organisations need to come under that umbrella and meet each other beyond the histories, splits, competition and fantasies of the other, to a place where we can make personal contact, dialogue and learn to collaborate with each other and grow connections.

So this was some of the spirit I tried to share at the meeting, and I certainly felt that it was met with enthusiasm, energy, and support for the wider engagement of the Gestalt community. Whilst we missed the people who weren’t able to make it, it also felt fitting that we started small and everyone was able to speak and be heard.

Well established institutes were represented, like the Gestalt Centre and Metanoia, and ‘younger’ ones such as the Welsh Psychotherapy Partnership and the Albany Centre.

Discussing

The British Gestalt Journal and UKAGP were noted to have some shared objectives in serving and supporting the Gestalt community, and being more active regarding communication routes to the training institutes.

Hopes that the CG could address shared goals and concerns across the institutes, such as the challenges and bureaucracy involved in becoming EAGT members, and then the possibility of getting into EAGT committees, reciprocity of recognition, getting Gestalt added to the CORE form as a modality check box, designing a Gestalt efficacy measure, promoting Gestalt outwards to service users, other modalities andthe wider community.

Recognising younger generations coming through, and the changing field, some EAGT colleagues are promoting and educating the public about Gestalt by engaging with the media, television, and radio, and EAGT is looking to develop a YouTube channel to offer short up to date engaging clips which will challenge the limited and outdated representation that is currently available (i.e. Perls/Gloria film).

We shared our sense of achievements that the different organisations have had – continuing to recruit trainees in the current financial climate, proud of graduates, large group work, social enterprise initiatives for clinics, and funding achieved from a Boston charity for a research conference in Wales, suggestion to contact the EAGT Research committee for potential collaboration/hosting the next conference.

Underlying the value of a national online Gestalt calendar that we all commit to keeping up to date – avoiding unnecessary date clashes, a place to go to check – talk about linking the BGJ online calendar with the UKAGP one once the new website is up. Willingness for institutes to take responsibility for sharing their dates and information with UKAGP.

I encouraged people to look at the EAGT website to understand the structure, see who is involved, and especially look at the HR&SR, PC&CS and Research committee pages, where you can access documents and resources to use and share.

The NOGT representatives meet for an informal gathering for a couple of hours twice a year before the General Board meetings, and any CG member who would like to accompany the delegate would be welcome to do so (cost is not covered).

Having reviewed the earlier plan for a joint conference in 2016, in response to various concerns voiced (including that it would be in competition with the AAGT/EAGT conference), we are looking forward to a very special UKAGP summer residential conference on 30 June – 2 July 2017, where we will celebrate 25 years of the BGJ. We see this as an ideal opportunity for the CG to engage members of their organisations to encourage a wider representation onto the Conference Organising Group (COG), to be part of making it a truly national event. Whilst much work has already been done on the programme plans, specifically from the BGJ inviting international writers to be a key part, it was voiced at the importance of engaging a good representation of UK Gestaltists too, and there is room and space for people to get involved.

Continuing

UKAGP will continue to pay for the organisation of the CG and asks other organisations to pay the expenses of their delegates. There is willingness to share the costs and travel by hosting at different places, but also concern raised about increased costs and time of travelling cross-country rather than to London.

On reflection of the amount of time it took to find this date, and with the hope of maximising the number of people who can make the next meetings, we have decided that for 2016 we agree to meet around two dates that are already in the Gestalt calendar – the UKAGP Community Day/AGM in June, and the BGJ Seminar Day in November. We will send out a Doodle Poll with options of times before and after these two events, and hope that many of us will already be planning to attend, or if not, may then be able to combine the two, thus saving time and reducing costs.

We also ask those of you who have not yet done so, to please send details of a second delegate, who can attend as a reserve if you are not able to.

Thank you to everyone who was part of this exciting afternoon, and we very much look forward to seeing those of you who missed out at our next meeting.